There is an amazing clarity of vision that people get at certain times. Someone whose house has just burned down will say that the only truly important thing was that no lives were lost. Someone who knows they are dying gains great acuity about what’s important in life and what’s not.
But most of us, most of the time, are wandering around in a kind of mire. We might think that we’re doing our best, but what are we doing? Our best at what?
Sometimes, perhaps often, we should stop. Come to a full and utter stop for a period of time so that we can truly look at ourselves, our lives, what we’re spending our time on, if we’re honouring our passions and realising our dreams.
Honouring our passions. Many of us don’t even recognise our passions any more. We’re so entrenched in our working lives, domestic chores, things that we ‘have’ to do that we not only don’t do something concrete towards our passions, we don’t even know what they are any more.
This is the time for subtraction, not addition. Clarity of vision comes from having less in your life, not more. Paring down physical possessions can help. Lessening the amount your eyes look at and therefore your brain has to process is a brilliant idea. Having routines that work on autopilot can also be helpful. Your brain can rest from the minutia, the dross, and in doing so has the energy for more important work.
Getting clarity on what you spend your time thinking about is another step in the right direction. If you spend a great deal of your time thinking, “They should” or “I wish” then you are wasting your precious resource in an utterly stupid way. Of course, most of us do it and we don’t know how to stop. That doesn’t make it less stupid.
We spend a great deal of time doing unimportant things. Once we’ve pruned the television and the computer time, we can look around and truly evaluate what we spend our days doing. It’s fairly likely that we’ll find huge blocks of time that, if not exactly wasted, could be freed up with just a little thought or a new way of doings things. I’m not really thinking about getting more efficient, here. Rather, of finding ways to do a little less on an ongoing basis so our minds have time to spend on important things.
I certainly don’t want to get to the end of my life and wonder why I didn’t spend a bit of time working out what were the truly important things in my life … and doing them.